The Tiger

Siberian tiger caught in a camera trap in the far north of China. This is a Google Map showing the location where this Siberian tiger was captured by a remote camera trap device. These cameras are left alone and activated by movement. The name of the location as reported in online news media is confusing as there appears to be different versions of the same name of the names are wrong. For sure, though, this large tiger was spotted in a mountain range called 'Greater Hinggan Mountains' in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Xiao Hinggan Ling as shown in the map is an individual mountain as I understand it. In any event the location is in the extreme north-east of China and a place where the experts believed that the tiger was extinct. They've been proved wrong. As is the case with all tiger populations, there has been a massive diminishing of numbers since the turn of the 20th century. Some subspecies of tiger have become extinct in the wild.  The Siberian tiger is...

No, tigers don't eat zebras under natural circumstances as there are no zebras where the tiger lives which is in Asia (Bengal tiger and other subspecies) and the far east of Siberia (Siberian tiger). Zebras live in Africa where the lion predominantly lives (the Asiatic lion lives in north-east India (Gir Forest). So, there is no opportunity for a tiger living in wild to attack a zebra. However, sometimes zookeepers feed their tigers zebras which are surplus to requirements (see below). Do tigers eat zebras? No unless they are fed to a tiger. Image: Pixabay (know loon). If the zebra did live in India, the tiger would attack it because tigers eat almost anything they can catch from frogs to elephant calves in the words of Fiona Sunquist ( Wild Cats of the World ). The zebra is a nice-sized prey animal for the tiger. Perfect as it would be relatively easy to attack and kill and large enough to provide food for a good time. Tigers need large prey animals because they eat so much. RELAT...

Here are two images which provide us with a tiger count for 2014 and the distribution of the tiger at the same date. It seems to me that the IUCN Red List's data stops at 2014. I have found this with other cat species. What is happening? A lot can change over 7 years. A hell of a lot in fact. The IUCN Red List needs to update its information annually at the very least. Am I missing the point or something? No idea. World tiger count at 2014 is 4,240 according to the guys who should know: IUCN Red List. This is a screenshot from their PDF file. I have taken a liberty in lifting these images from their PDF files but I do so for educational purposes. I was surprised that they came up with the number of 4,240 tigers left in the wild on the planet. That is more than I had thought. How accurate is their information? It is certainly out of date and it is an estimate. Can't trust it I am afraid. This information should be treated as guidelines only. Where was the tiger found in the w...

No, the tiger lives in Asia - in 2014, from East India to the far east of Russia. The Amazon rainforest is in South America. Another big cat lives in the Amazon rainforest, the jaguar. In size, the jaguar is third largest after the tiger (1st) and lion (2nd). The jaguar has the strongest bite of all cats. The puma also lives in S. America.

Nov. 2014: The tiger is native to many countries where it no longer exists so we can't simply point to countries where it is found and say it is native solely to those countries. The tiger's range has been hugely reduced in recent times. It once extended across Asia from eastern Turkey and the Caspian Sea and going eastward south of the Tibetan plateau to Manchuria and the Sea of Okhotsk. It is extinct in Turkey, Northern Iran, Afghanistan and the Indus Valley of Pakistan. The tiger was once common over the foothills of the Himalaya through Nepal, Sikkim (state of India), Bhutan, Assam (state of India) and Myanmar (Burma). These are some of the countries and states of India where the tiger is native.  The great Sundarbans tiger reserve straddles India and Bangladesh. The tiger was once widely distributed in Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia. These are also countries to which the tiger was and is native. The tiger was abundant in Korea but now possibl...

What caused the extinction of the Javan tiger? It is really a story about the usual culprit - humans. In the 1800s tigers were widespread in Java. The forests of Java were the tiger's habitat. The forests were "converted to teak" (1). So the tiger's habitat was despoiled by people. The lost of tiger habitat forced the Javan tiger to find sanctuary in inaccessible places on the island. By the 1970 the tiger lived on the southeast coast of Java on the Meru-Betiri Reserve. The reserve was not good tiger habitat. Deer, the prey of tigers, was hunted. Hunting of deer in combination with rapid human population growth lead to a rapidly declining deer population. By the 1950s deer could only be found outside reserves or sanctuaries. And these places were few in number. Another prime tiger prey, the wild boar was slaughtered under government directive by poisoning.  The only abundant prey for the tiger was primates with very low boar numbers. Javan tigers at this tim...

I have created several pages on the ranges of the tiger and indeed all the wildcats so I won't go into great detail here but refer to those pages. Suffice to say that the range of the tiger has been on a continual downward path for about a century and a crisis point has been reached it seems. The tiger can no longer be forced into small reserves without further decline in population size. The tiger range is now so fragmented it is almost impossible to draw it. The Caspian tiger was not a subspecies and is extinct while the South China tiger as mentioned is all but extinct living in China (Fujian, Guangdong, Hunan, Jiangxi). The distribution of the other tigers is as follows. Bengal tiger is now more or less confined to reserves (but it is said that 60+% of Bengal tigers live outside reserves 7 - is this true in 2009?) of which most are in India (1400 tigers). But reserves are not protecting the tiger from being poached. The map below shows where the Bengal tigers are in India...